Will Immigrants from China Replace the Immigrants from Mexico? Chinese workers could replace Mexican immigrants Will Immigrants from China Replace the Immigrants from Mexico?

By DUDLEY L. POSTON JR. and PETER A. MORRISON

Published 12:01 am, Saturday, August 13, 2011

Until now, Mexico has supplied the United States, especially Texas and California, with immigrant workers to fill low-wage jobs. That's about to change, in the wake of an unprecedented decline in Mexican immigration and a new influx of Chinese immigrant workers who will be fleeing hopeless conditions in China; many of them will enter the U.S. undocumented.

These developments will cast in sharp relief the inherent contradictions in the practices comprising our current immigration policy. These immigrants from China will likely galvanize support from millions of Chinese-Americans to rationalize the policy once and for all.

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Mexican immigration - legal and undocumented - now stands at an all-time low and may have even stopped. "For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative," according to Princeton's Douglas Massey, who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project. Also, a report by Mexico's National Statistics Institute noted recently that "in the first quarter of 2011, … the net migration balance was almost nothing." Mexico is now in the process of reversing its century-old status of being a net exporter of migrants.

In China, meanwhile, an economy demanding urban manpower has precipitated what surely ranks as the largest peacetime migration in recorded human history. Since the early 1990s, millions of rural agricultural workers - men and women - have moved to jobs in the burgeoning cities on China's east coast, filling mostly low-level construction, manufacturing and household service jobs. They number nearly 220 million - almost half of China's entire urban population.

Most rural Chinese move within China without official permission, as temporary urban workers, known as "floaters." They are supposed to "float" back home eventually, but most don't. Instead, they join China's unofficial and fiercely competitive low-wage urban labor markets, often filling jobs that permanent urban residents shun.

Urban unemployment in China, now at an all-time high, has turned the floaters' world upside down. Around 20 million floaters are unemployed (being typically first fired) and no longer can send money home. Unwilling to return home penniless and lose face, they also find themselves with little or no prospect of any livelihood in Chinese cities. Their only realistic option, reminiscent of their predecessors who sought their fortunes in California starting in the 1840s, is to seek their fortunes abroad.

The Chinese in the U.S. today form a potent interest group of Chinese-Americans of more than 3.3 million nationwide. We estimate that around 50 million floaters eventually will emigrate from China, many illegally, and that ties will draw several million of them to Chinese-American enclaves in Texas, California and elsewhere in the U.S. We have, in Massey's words, "the seeds of an enormous … flow of immigrants [to the United States] that would dwarf levels of migration now observed from Mexico." Those seeds today lie dormant, pending a stronger U.S. job market.

What does this shift of human resources portend? Opponents of immigration - including, understandably, jobless American workers - may not welcome more foreign newcomers. Nevertheless, established immigration networks anchored by longstanding family ties to particular destinations in Texas, California, New York and other states will facilitate their arrival, surreptitiously or otherwise.

Most Chinese immigrants will be of prime working age, and their paychecks could well fortify the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. They will be another welcome measure of human ambition from Asia.

But the question is: Can we, a nation of immigrants, welcome them as "family"?

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Poston is a professor of sociology and director of the Asian Studies Program at Texas A&amp;M University. Morrison is an applied demographer and the president of Morrison and Associates in Nantucket, Mass.